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He has since overturned 15 of the 17 charges brought against him (he’s appealing against the other two) and written A Matter Of Principle, an unflinching and surprisingly engaging memoir given that it details his nine-year battle with the US justice system.

It is this that has brought him to the UK and the studios of Have I Got News For You, a decision that has sparked amusement and amazement in equal measure.

If there is one thing the panellists like more than taking potshots at a pillar of the establishment, then it is demolishing a fallen pillar of the establishment – yet Lord Black, 68, couldn’t care less.

‘Well, I am not a pillar of the establishment,’ he says archly, sitting in the study of his home in the Bridle Path area of Toronto.

‘And I am not fallen.

They will stub their toes.

Support: Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel pictured in 2011

I am totally flabbergasted at the absurdly over-scrutinised nature of this.

I’m only going on because I’m trying to sell the book. I wouldn’t cross the street to appear on it if I wasn’t.

‘It’s part of my agreement with the publisher. I wouldn’t even do it to sell books if I hadn’t promised to try to sell books.

I’ve seen the show but not for years.

I remember it when good old Angus – what was his last name? – was on it before he ran into sticky weather with his wife or something.

‘I’m not afraid, I assure you. I’ve been around the track a good many times. They can be as brutal as they want and I’ll feel fully licensed to reciprocate.’

According to Lord Black, he has been ‘dwarfed by a caricature public image that has lurched about like a clumsy monster for decades’.

Born Conrad Moffat Black, the son of a wealthy Canadian industrialist, he and his second wife, columnist Barbara Amiel, were renowned for their lavish lifestyle.

There was a vast home in Kensington, West London, an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue and two private jets because, according to Barbara, ‘however well one plans ahead, one always finds one is on the wrong continent’.

When the couple were photographed in 2000 arriving at a fancy dress ball at Kensington Palace in full period costume, the picture was complete.

The press baron was compared to the ruthless 17th Century French power broker, Cardinal Richelieu, his wife to that beacon of extravagance and greed, Marie Antoinette.

The photograph will surely make its way into Have I Got News For You’s picture round.

Brutal: Lord Black is ready for the jibes of Ian Hislop, left, and Paul Merton

‘Pah,’ Lord Black exclaims. ‘She wasn’t the Queen and I wasn’t a cardinal.

Look, I really don’t give a s*** what they say. If they want to start slinging the mud around, they’ll get it back in their faces.

‘I’m not that good at seeing myself as others do.

It’s a blind spot people have but I guess that I’m portrayed as self-important, authoritarian – not humourless – but a rather heavy-handed and nasty person at times and a reactionary politically.

And extravagant.

And not much of that has any truth to it.

The extravagance is a complete caricature.

I lived modestly compared to what my means were.

‘But I don’t much care what people think.

Maybe I’ll give back as good as I get, maybe not, but whatever happens this isn’t the first time I’ll have exchanged acerbities with people.

Normally I don’t do too badly at it.’

It’s hardly subtle but this is the first step in his ‘relaunch’.

He has completed another book (a strategic history of the United States) and is looking into business opportunities.

He was forced to sell his London house but hopes to buy another next year when he will, in all likelihood, return to the House of Lords.

Lord Black says: ‘I’m so disconnected from British politics I wouldn’t go back to it quickly.

If I felt I was a British resident and I’d informed myself and brought myself up to speed on what was happening in the country I’d be happy to take my place.

‘But I’ve spent the past nine years fighting the most powerful government in the world and its local quislings and it’s been very distracting.

So I’m in relaunch mode but I’m not far up on my launch arc at this moment.

I’m relaunching my commercial career but in a different plane to where it was before. I w

ould not touch a public company, I will not deal with regulators or ratings agencies ever again.’

At his peak, Lord Black was worth an estimated £250 million and ran the third-biggest newspaper group in the world.

As well as the Telegraph he owned the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, The Spectator and more than 500 newspapers across the US and Canada.

Yet there was always a sense what he valued most was being a part of the national debate.

And he would clearly like to be part of it once again.

Of the Coalition, Lord Black declares: ‘You had to change governments, you couldn’t re-elect that old government but it would have been better to give the Conservatives a majority because I don’t think the Lib-Dems have shown an aptitude for government.

‘I think some of the Ministers are doing very well, such as Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith.

It doesn’t surprise me – I know them and I thought they’d do well.

‘I think it’s difficult for the Prime Minister, caught as he is between a party that is to the Right of him and a Coalition that is to the Left of him.

He’s not a great artistic leader like a Disraeli but he’s doing his best.

‘I’m not qualified to talk about Cameron but if he was an absolute world-beater he would have got a majority.

He clearly has some human qualities.

I would give him the honour due to the holder of that office and wish him well.’

But Lord Black heaps praise on Boris Johnson, his former editor at The Spectator, and Cameron’s advancing rival.

‘Boris is a man of destiny,’ he says. ‘He’s an unstoppable force.

I think he’d be a formidable leader.

He’s very intelligent and cunning.

He can be misleading, deceiving certainly. He’s a sly fox masquerading as a teddy bear.

People love him. I don’t know how his schtick never seems to wear out but people can’t get enough of it.

‘I think Boris will be a very successful and prominent political chief for a long time.

Some of these guys you just know they’re not going to last that long.

You always knew John Major was not going to be an epochal figure but Boris could be.’

Generous towards those he admires, Lord Black is scathing of those he despises.

And there are many, chief among them his former adversary Rupert Murdoch.

He was not surprised by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and is appalled by the hypocrisy of those who were in thrall to its owner.

‘The professed astonishment and disappointment of the British Establishment was one of the all-time backflips of hypocrisy,’ he says.

‘For 40 years they knew how Murdoch ran his company and they did nothing but kiss his undercarriage.

‘I have no idea if he had my phone hacked.

It wouldn’t surprise me but I don’t know.

I don’t fly off the handle and accuse everybody of everything but he is one of the most completely ruthless men I’ve ever met.

He is a psychopath, a person of no emotional or ethical thought, governed entirely by an expedient analysis of what his self-interest requires and oblivious to any other consideration and any other attachments.

‘He’s an astonishingly cold man, like Stalin except that he doesn’t kill people.

I have no reason to believe he would – I’m not suggesting he’s a homicidal psychopath – he just severs people out of his life like that.

I have great admiration for what he’s achieved but he’s a terrible man.’

The former press baron also lets his biographer, Tom Bower, have both barrels.

Bower’s book, Conrad And Lady Black: Dancing On The Edge, about his downfall, was published by Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.

Lord Black, positively growling, says: ‘I assume he was engaged to write a smear job and that he has been indemnified because if he isn’t we’ll take the fillings out of his teeth and the roof off his house when we finally get around to dragging him into court here. He’s a dead man.’

He then turns his guns on the British press while acknowledging, most politely, that he happens to be talking to one of its members.

‘I think the national media – and I regret having to say this as you seem very nice – but they are the lowest mutation of human life.’

Of course, it doesn’t help that Lord Black became the story, a proprietor pilloried in the pages of his own newspapers.

In America, it is now generally accepted he was harshly treated. Originally accused of a $500 million (£312 million) ‘corporate kleptocracy’ he was convicted, finally, of misappropriating $600,000 (£375,000).

He seems remarkably unscathed by his time inside, where his fellow inmates included child-molesters, drug-traffickers and Mafia dons and where he slept in a block of 60 inmates. ‘I met lots of bank robbers.

I didn’t find them that interesting apart from sociologically,’ he says.

‘There was one whose whole family were bank robbers.

And the head of the family, his grandmother, robbed banks – she was from rural North Carolina and always arrived and fled by horse.

I found it so different from any milieu I’ve been in.

‘The mafiosi don was interesting.

And the middle echelon ones were colourful, just like the people we see in films – the accent, everything, they have that sense of humour.

‘For the most part, what people don’t like is pomposity, you can’t be pompous in a place like that but I am not pompous by nature. I’m just me.’

He was more worried about the effect on his wife than himself.

‘No one could ever ask for a more supportive and devoted wife and some of the things that were said about her were shocking,’ he says.

‘She came every week, even when she had to come back from China to do it – contrary, I may say, to my former protege Max Hastings, who circulated and reported a prediction that she would not be much good at visiting in prison.’

It is the treatment of Barbara, he says, that hurt him the most.

For his own part he remains determinedly upbeat.

After all, life’s not so bad.

While her husband is in London, Barbara will be attending David Furnish’s 50th birthday celebrations in Los Angeles.

The couple have a beautiful home, complete with 40,000 books and a range of artefacts including an iron copy of Stalin’s death mask that Lord Black bought from Enoch Powell’s estate.

His fortune now sits at £50 million.

‘I always thought I would win,’ he says. ‘As far as I’m concerned I’ve won given the correlation of forces between the US government and myself.

I feel I’ve done quite well.

They went for life imprisonment and impoverishment and I’m here and I’m fine and I’m not poor.’

And with that he must go but not before saying, rather nonchalantly: ‘Just one thing – please do send me an email and tell me if I seem to be seriously intimidated by my hosts on Have I Got News For You.’

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Conrad Black blasts back: Unbowed by three years in jail. tycoon launches fierce attack on critics - and draws battle lines for his appearance on Have I Got News For You